Farewell To The Age Of Innocence In The '50s, Daytona Teenagers Learned A Lot Of Things In Old Mainland High School.coping With Adulthood Wasn't One Of Them.

March 2, 1986|By Skip Lowery

YOU SHOULDN'T LIVE ANY place too long these days, especially if you grow up in Florida. Best to go far away after high school, and stay away, if you want the memories of home to linger unchanged within the nostalgic fog of imagination. You hang around, or keep popping in for visits, and you'll see the landscape crumble before your eyes.

First it was the Coquina Hotel in Ormond Beach. I grew up near there, worked as a busboy, and discovered many secrets of life in the labyrinths of its underground quarters. Came home from college one summer and poof ! it was gone. The noble old mosque with its wide rolling lawn had been swept from the earth. In its place appeared a multistory motel which remains to this day the standard by which I judge tastelessness in architecture.

Then it was the railroad station on Magnolia Avenue in Daytona. One day you're doing a photo-essay on the Renaissance prototypes for the station's lovely arcade and tile roof; the next day crash! bam! you see a picture in the newspaper of a bulldozer pushing what remains of that lovely arcade into a heap.

So now what happens? I'm riding my bicycle down Beach Street after a summer vacation away, and I see across a parking lot what's left of . . . my old high school !

''Hey!'' I'm shouting to my girlfriend Kathleen, who has biked on ahead. ''Did you see that?''

She hadn't because she moved here from somewhere else, as I should have. What would she care about a bunch of half-demolished buildings.

''That's Mainland High, my old school. How could they do that!''

I cut across the parking lot and stopped near the old Third Street entrance. A bulldozer and dragline sit idly in what used to be the old phys-ed field. It's Sunday; no one seems to be working. Kathleen catches up, looks at the rubble in front of us. ''This was your high school? What a mess!''

I look where she's looking. On what's left of the second story I can see where Robert Sargent hung a chair out a window in 10th-grade English. Now all the window frames are broken, pieces of plaster and twisted iron girders stick out over the first-story moldings like feelers from some giant insect. The roof is completely gone.

''Yeah . . . that was it. I graduated from here in (could it be?) 1958.''

''I was only in first grade then.''

''Never mind.''

We get off our bikes. I'm feeling a little despondent, older -- but excited, too. A succession of images come to me like one of those rapid montages on TV ads. I point this way and that, suddenly the hometown guide on a nostalgia binge.

''Over there . . . that's where I played gator ball in Coach Graham's PE class. And there's the old bandroom. I got kicked out in my junior year for drinking beer on a trip to Miami.''

I look behind me to an interior wall which is stripped bare except for a lavatory sink still oddly in place on the third floor. ''Cuddy's physics lab was to the right of that sink. I remember the radiators were on the ceiling. Drove Cuddy crazy because heat rises, he would tell us, and so what good are radiators on the . . . ''

I turn to where I thought Kathleen would be and find her sitting on concrete steps, which now lead from the sidewalk to nowhere. Obviously, she isn't into this, and why should she be? I tell her I want to shoot a few photos and then we'll leave.

I step carefully among the fragments of glass and broken cement scattered over the ground. Where are the bannisters, I wonder? That wonderful woodwork? I remember the way it felt on my hand when I leaped downward two steps at a time after the final bell. Other sense memories -- sounds, smells, tastes -- dart in and out so fast I feel dizzy. Why didn't I ever come back here before they . . . ?

No, there's no use asking that. And there's no use ranting about ''progress'' and the people doing the demolition.

The building was old even when I was a student. I realize what it would cost to keep it going. Besides, it hasn't been a high school for more than 20 years. Ours was one of the last classes to graduate from here.

But still, there ought to be a monument, a plaque, something to commemorate all those years when . . . When what? I make a mental note to think about it later, and to find out what will happen to the land once the buildings are removed. I also want to dig out my old yearbook.

By this time I'm standing near a part of the west wing, which is still intact. It includes Miss Gatch's English class. Hoo boy, speaking of monuments! Let us enshrine this room, make it impervious to time just as she was, before it is too late. How many struggled through 11th and 12th grade under her demanding and loving eye? It was in that room I discovered Emily Dickinsen, Thoreau and, of course, Shakespeare.

I begin declaiming: ''Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . .'' My voice echoes in the cracked walls and Kathleen looks up momentarily. She's getting impatient.